The element of change and the effect it has on human society is a persistent theme in Leiber's fiction, and he is one of the few science-fiction writers of his generation to consistently stay abreast of the cultural changes around him. Leiber, above all, has been aware that change—or evolution—is not only inevitable, but necessary to human growth. It is a theme that is most obvious in his Change War stories, but it can be found in subtler forms throughout his fiction. (pp. 13-14) Gather...

[Adept's Gambit], built around the characters of The Grey Mouser (personifying Harry Fischer) and the seven-foot sword-wielding giant Fafhrd (the romantic incarnation of Fritz Leiber, Jr.), is beyond question not only the first but the best of the entire series Leiber was to write about these characters…. From the moment that the spell is cast upon Fafhrd that temporarily changes every woman into a pig the instant he kisses her; on to the Grey Mouser's consultation with the seven-eyed N...

[In The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer deduced] that in essence primitive magic was not like primitive religion, as most observers had assumed, but was instead similar to science, in its belief that the universe was subject to "immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely". The Golden Bough makes this claim overtly…. [And] it is a relatively short step from saying that magic is very like science to saying that it is actually a form of science. It is thi...

For more than thirty years, Fritz Leiber has been giving his readers glimpses of Heaven and Hel in his own special time machine/spaceship theater. One might describe it, if the metaphor is not too conventional, as the theater of his imagination. Such a metaphor is more accurate than usual in the case of Leiber, since he often designs his stories according to theatrical conceptions. (p. v) The influence of theater upon his work is more than just a simple costuming of his fantasy and science-fiction stories i...

It's too bad that we have no tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser [in The Best of Fritz Leiber]. Not only did that charming pair of rogues—the tall Northern barbarian and the small city-bred trickster—launch the author's career; they are still going strong, to the joy of everybody who appreciates a rattling good fantasy adventure. But by no means are these stories conventional "sword and sorcery." The world of Nehwon is made real in wondrously imaginative detail, its ...

[The Change War] stories reflect Leiber's fascination with the instability of much of modern American life. In Leiber's best fictions he is able to endow this instability, this American capacity for change, with a profound supernaturalism that can turn the most freakish accidents of urban chance into nightmares of paranoic intensity. The Changewar plots are created around the premise that there are two forces in the universe battling for supremacy in the greatest war ever—a war conducte...

Here is a mistake from Fritz Leiber, though it warms the heart. Our Lady of Darkness is a mistake of displacement. Whatever one reads of Leiber, in whatever genre he presents to us his skill and touch, the implied author (the author visible in the text, all we have a right to know) who speaks to one seems to exhale a kind of shy sacrificial gravitas, however garish or commercial the story he's telling happens to be. It somehow seems brave for an adult person like Fritz Leiber to expose himself withou...

All I ever try to write is a good story with a good measure of strangeness in it. The supreme goddess of the universe is Mystery, and being well entertained is the highest joy. I write my stories against backgrounds of science, history and fantasy worlds of swords and sorcery. I write about the intensely strange everyday human mind and the weird and occult—about which I am a skeptic yet which interest me vastly. I always try to be meticulously accurate in handling these backgrounds, to be sure of my ...

[Our Lady of Darkness is] an absolutely superb book, Leiber's first novel of the supernatural since the incredible Conjure Wife…. (p. 4) While the novel is easy to read and follow, almost every page is filled with little sub-plots and commentaries that shift and slide with ambiguous purpose. The reader who is familiar with Leiber's own background may be convinced the book is only a thinly disguised autobiography embellished with interludes of supernatural horror. And those with a solid ...

[Many of the pieces in The Worlds of Fritz Leiber] are either overwritten or unimaginatively resolved, if not both together…. [To] Leiber's credit is the fact that none of these stories pretends to be anything more than an entertainment—even though he manages to touch on such weighty subjects as political witch-hunting, cold-war politics, the Bomb, father-and-son relationships, bungling bureaucracy, growing old, cats, and (obsessively but chastely, as if afraid to confront a healthy lus...

The Book of Fritz Leiber includes ten stories and nine essays illustrating his range…. Leiber's imaginative and playful range of thought brightens up the topics he chooses, though his reviews and the essays on foreign words and King Lear are not particularly stimulating or new. Very few of the stories other than "The Spider" and "Cat's Cradle" match the quality of his commonly anthologized fiction or of those which have won awards, giving the suspicion that t...

You will recall from anthologies such brilliant Leiber stories as "Coming Attraction" and "A Bad Day for Sales" bitterly depicting a near-future American society in which present trends of sadism, exploitation and hypocrisy have reached their nadir of decadence. ["The Green Millennium"] is a full-scale novel of that society, evoked with Heinleinesque skill at detailed indirect exposition—and of how men rose from that nadir because a technologically unemployed...

Imagined monsters are generally more successful than manufactured ones where nasty tales are concerned, and Fritz Leiber demonstrates this effortlessly with [Night Monsters]. One or two of the early stories tend towards the weak and garrulous, and "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes"—which is about the devouring She rather than vampirism proper—would surely have been impossible at a later stage of Mr. Leiber's psychosexual knowingness. But the more recent tales such as "...

Night's Black Agents, a collection of Fritz Leiber short work, is an outstanding bargain. Leiber is famous for being neglected. That is to say, periodically a critic discovers that this still-active master storyteller has been consistently ahead of his time over a very long career in SF. What matters truly is that, whether as a traditional fantasist, or a sword-and-sorcery writer, or an artist of "straight" science fiction, Leiber is unfailingly entertaining on a very high level…...

Ever since its magazine appearance ten years ago, Fritz Leiber's "Conjure Wife" has been esteemed as the definitive novelistic treatment of witchcraft in the modern world. A precisely balanced blend of fantasy and science fiction, of psychological novel and suspense melodrama, it stands on a plane with Leiber's own "Gather, Darkness!" or "Destiny Times Three"—which means all of the impact and excitement of the best pulp story-telling, with a lit...